1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a package take-out apparatus for taking out individual packages piled and housed in a package container, and to the package container itself. The present invention also relates to an unwrapping apparatus for unwrapping a package wrapped with a wrapping sheet to obtain a solid object wrapped therein.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, there has been a widely used dry-type slide for chemical analysis (hereinafter, referred to simply as a “slide”). Such a slide may be used for quantitative analysis of a chemical component or a material component of a liquid sample dripped thereon. More specifically, the quantitative analysis may be carried out by dripping a drop of a liquid sample on the slide, putting the slide in an incubator for a predetermined time to promote color reaction (i.e., color matter producing reaction) of the liquid sample, irradiating the slide with radiation including a predetermined wavelength to measure optical density of a target biochemical substance contained in the liquid sample, and determining physical density of the target biochemical substance based on the measured optical density referring to a predetermined working curve correlating the optical density of the biochemical substance with the physical density thereof. The predetermined wavelength included in the radiation is determined depending on the combination of the target biochemical substance contained in the liquid sample and a reagent mixed in a material of the slide. The entire process described above is carried out by a suitably configured biochemical analyzer.
The biochemical analyzer used for the above quantitative analysis has a slide stocking portion which holds a plurality of slides ready for the analysis. Usually, when shipping the slides, each slide is wrapped tightly with a plastic film laminated with a metal lamina or a plurality of slides are packed in a single tightly-wrapped cartridge. In each case, an unwrapped slide must be used immediately or stocked in a dry atmosphere, as the reagent mixed in the material of the slide deteriorates rapidly. Therefore, it is desirable to use a plurality of individually-wrapped slides when there is a need to analyze many slides.
Usually, about ten to fifty slides wrapped individually (hereinafter, referred to as “slide packs”) are housed in a container before being shipped to an examiner. The examiner needs to take each slide pack out of the container immediately before using it, leaving the rest of the slide packs in the container for storage. However, preparation for the analysis will require a lot of effort if the examiner has to manually take out and unwrap each slide pack one by one.
To reduce the problem, there have been several known apparatuses for unwrapping a package wrapped with a wrapping sheet such as a wrapping film to obtain a solid object wrapped therein. One example of such apparatuses is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 9(1997)-237383. The apparatus disclosed in the Publication is directed to unwrapping a belt-like package containing a series of sub-packs each containing beverage ingredients therein. The sub-packs are tightly sandwiched between an upper wrapping sheet and a lower wrapping sheet. Although the disclosed apparatus is capable of unwrapping the belt-like package by peeling the upper wrapping sheet off from the lower wrapping sheet to obtain the sub-packs therein, the examiner is still required to manually detach edges of the upper and lower wrapping sheets in advance. Thus, the disclosed apparatus is incapable of unwrapping the individually wrapped slides in a completely automated manner.